Everything Is Awesome

The Lego Movie: A Toy Movie That's Actually As Fun As Playing With Toys

In truth, the latest era of films based on toys may already be over. In the post-Transformers gold rush, everything from Monopoly to Ouija was put into development, but nearly every project stalled, and the one that succeeded wound up being Battleship. So while this week’s The Lego Movie may look like a harbinger of the corporate branded world to come, it is in fact an outlier in several ways. It’s one of the few movies based on a toy with no explicit story behind it. And it is, so far, the only one that’s really good.

Directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord are becoming the go-to guys for spinning excellence out of explicitly terrible ideas. They adapted Judi and Ron Barrett’s slim, gentle children’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs into an energetic and wildly clever animated film. They turned the 80s curiosity 21 Jump Street into a bawdy action comedy. And now they’ve turned Legos—those plastic blocks, with no story or personality—into another energetic and wildly clever animated film, one that makes its story the actual experience of playing with these toys. You liked Legos as a kid because you could build a firehouse or a crazy pieced-together dragon or anything you wanted out of them. The Lego Movie, somehow, is about exactly that.

Well, technically it’s about Emmett (Chris Pratt), a little construction Lego man who does his job and lives his life exactly according to the instructions in the book. Like so many movie heroes before him, though, Emmett’s life is turned upside down when he meets Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a woman leading a resistance force against world leader President Business (Will Ferrell) and on the hunt for the Piece of Resistance. Whoever finds the piece is deemed The Special, with the power to change the world. Emmett, of course, stumbles into becoming The Special.

It all sounds familiar and it’s supposed to—Miller and Lord’s script repeatedly up-ends the Joseph Campbell clichés around the hero’s journey, grappling both with Emmett’s dim-bulb imagination and, slightly less successfully, the presence of Wyldstyle, next in a long line of smart girls who have to stand aside and watch the impulsive boy get all the credit. (Hopefully she, Hermione, Princess Leia, and Trinity from The Matrix can get together and vent once in a while.) The Lego Movie is tongue-in-cheek and honest about using the generic quest plot as an excuse to bounce around the colorful, constantly reinventing world of Legos, which sometimes resemble playsets remembered from childhood (The Old West! Middle Earth!) and other times exist to be collapsed, re-arranged, and played with by our heroes.

That anarchic sense of fun, shared by the creators and voice artists and the endlessly inventive animation, allows The Lego Movie to overcome its rote plot and muddled themes, especially near the end. Voice actors as varied as Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, and Charlie Day all seem to be actually enjoying themselves, and Lord and Miller’s signature absurdist humor allows for jokes ridiculous (Day repeatedly screaming, “Spaceship!”) and complex (the constant in-jokes about Batman’s gruff personality) and everything in-between. A twist in the third act adds a meta and surprisingly emotional spin to everything we’ve already seen; in a film industry littered with projects explicitly capitalizing on moviegoer’s nostalgia, The Lego Movie gets there with efficiency and a relentless, consistently endearing good humor.

The current rash of movies based on toys, or comic books, or video games, or fairy tales, exists to canonize the narrative building blocks of childhood, to provide frameworks for all your stories about Spider-Man or Megatron or Snow White, and then to sell you specially licensed toys so you can keep playing those stories out. The Lego Movie is also a carefully calibrated brand extension—you can already buy all the characters featured in the movie. But even if rights and licensing agreements won’t let them quite say it out loud, The Lego Movie also wants you to ignore that stuff, to cram a Ninja Turtle into a Barbie Dream House alongside a Transformer, or throw away all the pop- culture signifiers and use the Legos to build a giant castle straight from your own imagination. When the Millennium Falcon swings by and Batman shares a scene with Han Solo, it feels like anarchy to an adult who knows that Disney owns Lucasfilm and that Warner Bros. owns DC Comics. To a kid, it feels like every day at playtime. That anything-can-happen glee has become Lord and Miller’s specialty, and it enlivens The Lego Movie’s every scene. Maybe the toys-into-movies trend should officially give up now. It’s unlikely to get much better than this.